Corruption

March 14th, 2008 at 11:51 pm

This new story about corruption in Nigeria is not good news and not my typical basis for a post. But I think its important to address these issues too, even if its more difficult:

In the 90s corruption was the big buzzword as far as development assistance was concerned. The logic went that because money went to Africa was inevitably wasted by corrupt dictators as “money down the rat hole,” we had to choose between “grandma or Ghana” and that meant as little money for aid as possible.

The situation got so bad that the Jubilee Campaign–which was in many ways the precursor to the ONE Campaign–had an uphill battle trying to even talk about the issue as late at mid-2000.

The irony was that the Jubilee Campaign was writing off the debt incurred by corrupt governments, giving more legitimacy (and capacity) to the current, more effective governments, as verified by several benchmarks. In effect it was anti-corruption! Some argued, then and now, that forgiving debt provided an incentive for corruption by writing off the cost and removing the disincentive not to waste money. This makes some economic sense, but the big holes in the theory are that the cost of corruption is not being payed by the beneficiary (the corrupt government benefits, the people pay), so it has no deterrent effect to start with and furthermore, by burdening fledgling new governments the expectation is more corruption and less development by most economic models.

With that in mind the BBC reported an important story today about corruption in Nigeria. It turns out that the former president, who was a champion of efforts to tackle TB, was handing out no-bid contracts to friends who it appears never planned to fulfill the contracts. It’s bad news, and corruption is a problem.

But its good news that this is making the news. It’s good the Nigerian legislature is investigating these activities and cracking down on abuse. It’s good that Nigera had plans to build capacity to start with even if there were hiccups along the way. It’s not shocking that there will be some problems, some corruption; the U.S. had plenty in its early days and even in recent years here there has been a firestorm of controversy over no-bid contracts.

It’s not good news, but its news that show things are working as expected. Not everything in development is a success story but we can’t lose faith when a country wastes from aid or when an amendment we supported fails.

We’re just warming up . . .

P.S. The Biden-Lugar amendment, which restored $4.1 billion in funding to the Senate’s version of the international affairs budget, passed by a vote of 73 to 23. Check how your Senator voted and call and complain if they voted no!